to record a confusing, sometimes mediocre stylistic mélange of tracks. Misguided and self-serving, many of these tracks did more to reflect Hassinger’s studio abilities rather than the Prunes’ talent as a musical unit. Finding perspective on their own experience in the midst of accelerating success proved difficult for the group.
Mark: “Nobody knows the name of the album, I asked the guys at Warner Brothers and they don’t know!”
Annette: “They wanted us to write songs because they were going to cut an album right away. Basically, Dave would tell us what he wanted us to write. I would play something on the piano, then record on a
head. We couldn’t quite get the coin thing. We wanted to be a little darker, like you’re around the campfire.”
Annette: “I like ‘Sold To The Highest Bidder’. I thought that was kind of interesting, I thought they did a great job on that.”
“Somebody told me that the beginning is exactly like the Pink Floyd song ‘Astronomy Domine’. If Syd Barrett steals fromus, I’m a happy camper.”
little tape recorder. He wanted everything to be really different. The Prunes were so creative. The follow-up, ‘Get Me To The World On Time’, they did a great job on that.”
Mark: “We had decided after ‘I Had Too Much To Dream (Last Night)’ that we were going to use a lot of tremolo. The thing is buried in echo and reverb. It wasn’t so much trickery as it was the sounds of music, as opposed to just playing guitar. We went for the Bo Diddley beat; it’s such a hip beat. Years and years later, we ran into Bo Diddley at a festival, and James walked up to him and said: ‘Your check’s in the mail.’”
Preston: “‘Get Me To The World On Time’, I actually liked that better when we recorded it. As time went on, it went down in my opinion. Maybe because it didn’t get as high in the charts!”
James: “We were told: ‘You have three hours.’ So, we would sit down beforehand and plan out each layer of the recording, the way we had to do it to deal with the four-track situation, and deal with the players as well. We knew we weren’t going in there smoking dope and hanging out for 14 hours. We knew at the end of three hours they were going to go, ‘Hey that’s $400, you guys are broke again.’ It’s about hard work.”
Preston: “‘Are You Lovin’ Me More (But Enjoying It Less)’ was kind of our take-off
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on ‘Good Vibrations’ by The Beach Boys. It’s in sections and there’d be breaks. Dave couldn’t figure it out. [He’d ask,] ‘Why are you stopping?’ That was his lack of understanding of music, not being a musician.”
Mark: “Somebody told me years later that the beginning is exactly like the Pink Floyd song ‘Astronomy Domine’. If Syd Barrett steals from us, I’m a happy camper.”
Mark: “[On]‘Train For Tomorrow’, we gave a credit to everybody because it was an instrumental. Ken loved Wes Montgomery, and in the end it’s Wes’ [style of] guitar part. It’s a cool little track. ‘Luvin’’ is the first song James and I wrote together. We wanted to give Ken a chance to play this little bluesy riff. It’s James honking away on a harmonica. To this day it’s a cool little tune. It was the B-side to ‘I Had Too Much To Dream (Last Night)’, so it earned Dave a lot of money [since he was our song publisher]. James was lyrically more clever than I was, we formed an agreement that it didn’t matter who started it, or who wrote what. Both of us take credit for everything.”
Mark: “[On] ‘Sold To The Highest Bidder’ we slowed the track down, did a Dick Dale type picking and then sped it up. We wanted to do a real gypsy feel. For the end we wanted to simulate a coin rolling around; what you hear is a tape canister on the ground. We tried money on a drum
Preston: “[Dave] was an absolute dictator when it came to the choice of material. We had virtually no say. He took our opinion with a grain of salt, if that. There was a growing resentment between us and Dave Hassinger because we were being forced to do what we thought were stupid songs. We would do what we could to make them sound not ridiculous, and I think we succeeded most of the time. I felt that way about ‘I Had Too Much To Dream (Last Night)’ when we first got it, which for whatever reason turned into a classic. We just weren’t able to work that magic with ‘Tunerville Trolley’ and some of the other stuff.”
James: “I think it was kind of a display album for him or something. Remember, these are a bunch of garage guys and you’re trying to get them to do vaudevillian numbers. It’s just not going to work.”
Annette: “[My writing partner] Nancie [Mantz] was very creative. She would come up with these things that were just out of left field. She was amazing. [Dave] didn’t want to do everything like ‘I Had Too Much To Dream (Last Night)’, he wanted to show different sides of The Electric Prunes and how talented they were. Did I agree? No. But we just kept writing, you know?”
Mark: “We were treated as a means to an end. I don’t think Dave understood what we did. He wanted us to be The Beatles. Not musically, but in the variety of the types of songs they did. They would do a
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